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Category: space – Page 916

You may know graphene as a pseudo-legendary substance that could potentially revolutionize science and space travel and all sorts of things. If you don’t, you should get educated is pretty ridiculous. Simply made from carbon arranged into perfect one atom thing sheets makes the material one of the strongest ever observed. And, now, researchers at Rice University have found that so-called “rebar” graphene is dramatically tougher.

Graphene is much stronger than steel. In fact, an elephant could stand on a pencil and that pressure couldn’t break through a thin sheet of the material. But, because it is arranged in sheets, it can still be ripped if damaged from the right angle. But the researchers figured that reinforcing the structure, as we do with steel bars in concrete structures, l could help prevent damage.

The new research, published in the ACS Nano, a journal run by the American Chemical Society, Rice materials scientist Jun Lou and lead author Emily Hacopian examined the properties of rebar graphene under stress. Cracked and tears in the structure that otherwise would have spread across the sheet are stopped by the reinforcement while also staying stretchy and pliable.

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Science news is filled with fresh discoveries of all kinds of things. It seems like every day there’s a new dinosaur, planet, or ancient creature being brought back to life. Now, researchers are announcing the discovery of another new thing, but this time it’s a new… shape.

Just like the other “new” things that science brings us, the term “new” itself is relative. Just like the long-dead dinosaurs and incredibly-old planets being discovered on a regular basis, this new shape has been around for a while, but researchers are just now studying and describing it in detail. It’s called a “scutoid” and it’s actually pretty cool.

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Bishop on the Moon?

It might sound strange, but in addition to encompassing nine counties and hundreds of cities, the Diocese of Orlando, Florida also has jurisdiction over an otherworldly object: the Moon. Why might you ask? The answer involves an obscure rule from 1917 and the Apollo 11 space mission.

On June 18th, 1968 the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orlando, Florida was established. It would encompass much of the greater central Florida area, along with Cape Canaveral (We’ll get back to that later). William Donald Borders was ordained the first Bishop of Orlando. One year later, Bishop Borders would also become the first Bishop of the Moon.

The Apollo 11 space mission began with the launch from Cape Canaveral on July 16, 1969. The mission fulfilled the national goal proposed by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth, before this decade is out.” However, when Apollo 11 made its famous flight from Cape Canaveral to ultimately fulfill that goal, they inadvertently made Bishop Borders the first Bishop of the Moon thanks to an obscure rule from the 1917 Code of Canon Law in effect at the time.

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“When Stars Collide” sounds like the title track of Barry Manilow’s latest album.

Unfortunately, Barry hasn’t released a single since 2012.

But astronomers did make the first definitive detection of a radioactive molecule spilled from two colliding stars. So that’s something.

Spotted with the Atacama Large Millimeter/tarubmillimeter Array (ALMA) and Northern Extended Millimeter Array (NOEMA) radio telescopes, the form was apparently ejected into space by the collision of two Sun-like stars.

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3D bioprinting company Allevi has teamed up with California-based 3D printing and space technology firm Made In Space to develop the Allevi ZeroG – the first 3D bioprinter capable of working in low-gravity conditions.

Allevi (formerly BioBots) was founded in 2014 by University of Pennsylvania graduates Ricardo Solorzano and Daniel Cabrera. At the time, the ambitious duo set out to develop an accessible desktop bioprinting system which could be used for a wide variety of research and educational applications.

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Space agencies have successfully studied asteroid and comets up close on several occasions, but capturing one for mining is also in the works. A group of Chinese scientists is looking to go a step further. Their ambitious plan involves not just capturing an asteroid, but bringing it down to the surface of Earth for study and mining.

This does sound pretty crazy on the face of it, but researchers from the National Space Science Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences say it’s feasible. Researcher Li Mingtao and his team presented the idea at a conference to explore ideas for future technology in Shenzhen. Li says that the mission could focus on asteroids that cross Earth’s orbit, which could make them a potential hazard in the future. The Chinese plan could turn a hazard into a new source of rare materials.

The asteroids targeted by this project would be on the small side — probably just a few hundred tons. The first step is to send a fleet of small robotic probes to intercept the space rock. Then, they would deploy a “bag” of some sort that covers the asteroid, allowing the robots to slowly alter its course and steer it back to Earth.

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